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Gideon Haigh
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<!-- -->An age-old conjugation of democracy runs something like this: I am guided by the will of the people; you are a slave of public opinion; he is a crude and craven populist. It was on show in March, during the crazy few weeks that began with the hounding of the hapless CEO of Pacific...
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Gideon Haigh | April 2009 | The Monthly Essays | Society & Culture
Wright is speaking in his workshop, in Melbourne's inner north, and proving difficult to interview. Not because he is inarticulate - on the contrary, he speaks with unfaltering adamance. But he is visibly restless. He drops into a rocking chair. He moves to his office. He ascends a ladder. He...
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In the mid 1960s, Fred Friendly, friend of and producer to the legendary newsman Ed Murrow, visited his boss at CBS, the no-less legendary William Paley, and fell to arguing about the network's profitability. "How much money did CBS make last year?" demanded Friendly. Told it was $50...
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Consider these three vignettes from the storied life of Shane Warne, involving something that happened, then something that didn't, then something that is. On 10 June 2000, London's Daily Mirror publishes front-page allegations that Warne harassed a nurse, whom he met in a nightclub in...
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Any serious stock-market turbulence invites images of flappers, bathtub gin and plummeting stockbrokers: that is, of the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. It makes for compelling extracts from the newspapers of the era, such as this, from the New York Times: Wall Street's bull market collapsed...
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Gideon Haigh | The Nation Reviewed | November 2008 | Business
This year marks the centenary of an early classic of American finance: Fifty Years on Wall Street, by Henry Clews, a self-made speculative tycoon turned éminence grise. It is bookended by calamities. Clews first strolled the street during the Western Blizzard of 1857, when stock prices halved in a...
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Gideon Haigh | The Monthly Essays | October 2008 | Opera | Society & Culture
When Martin retired in January, after a 45-year career, it was with all passion spent. The voice of Wagner's Hans Sachs and Wotan was as rich as ever, but so tinged with bitterness that he declined a formal farewell. He would not be speaking now, save for the public airing of complaints by the...
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Live at the Roxy London WC2 (Jan-Apr 77), one of punk's indispensable artefacts, begins much as you'd expect, with three tracks of phlegm-flecked mindlessness from Slaughter & The Dogs and The Unwanted - bands as boneheaded as their names. Then there's a drawling voice, gentle but...
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Gideon Haigh | The Monthly Essays | August 2008 | Society & Culture
Still the most compelling aspect of the legend is The Average. One hundred is not the maximum possible arithmetic mean score in cricket, but 99.94, with its tincture of human fallibility, its hint of Oulipian constraint, could not have been more exquisitely contrived. To a generation addicted to...
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Mancunian Mark E Smith is the founder of The Fall, after 27 studio albums the most durable and protean of all bands to emerge from that burst of musical DIY inspired by punk 30 years ago. Actually, if that is news to you, no purpose is served by reading further: this memoir will be inexplicable....
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The mass of books lead lives of quiet desperation. Compared to the dowdy shops of yesteryear, the modern bookstore is a place of gaiety, even exuberance. But with essentially three months to make their mark before returning from whence they came, under Australia's self-devouring sale-or-return...
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Gideon Haigh | Adelaide | Adelaide Writers' Week | Journalism | Media | Public event | Society
In this entertaining and enlightening discussion, David Marr and Gideon Haigh discuss the conditions of contemporary journalism,the best aims of journalism and the notion of persuasion in relation to journalistic writing. Adelaide Writers' Week(Part 1 of 2) (Click here for Part 2)... » play video
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In this entertaining and enlightening discussion, David Marr and Gideon Haigh discuss the conditions of contemporary journalism, the best aims of journalism and the notion of persuasion in relation to journalistic writing.Adelaide Writers' Week(Part 2 of 2)... » play video
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They think well of Kevin Rudd at the National Library of Australia. For all his posturing as Mr History, John Howard only visited the library once - and then to launch the government's online-porn filter while the children of staffers gambolled for the cameras. Rudd has actually been a library...
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Upton Sinclair never had much faith in the movies. When the great American socialist's novel The Moneychangers (1908) was adapted for the screen, he was appalled to find that what he had written as a denunciation of JP Morgan was populated by millionaires performing selfless acts of charity. He...
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Gideon Haigh | The Monthly Essays | March 2008 | Business | Media
On the morning the Bulletin finally closed, Thursday, 24 January 2008, editor-in-chief John Lehmann went for a haircut. There were bound to be television cameras; he might as well look his best. Lehmann was right. The news crews duly came, but they camped out the front of ACP Magazines, at 54 Park...
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Gideon Haigh | The Nation Reviewed | February 2008 | Society & Culture
A couple of days after the second Test between Australia and India ended at the Sydney Cricket Ground amid acrimony and indignation, I boarded the tram for an evening's practice at my cricket club with 15-year-old Bill. A bright boy, Bill. I knew him to be keen on his cricket, and was...
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A story is told of Arthur Burns, Eisenhower's chief economic adviser, appearing before a congressional committee on unemployment. Peering through thick glasses from under his thatch of centre-parted hair, Burns dilated on the issue for some time in a sombre monotone, then seemed to stop. "...
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Gideon Haigh | The Monthly Essays | November 2007 | Politics | Society & Culture
Yet no decision has ramified so powerfully as one just 14 months after Ryan's execution, in a case that occasioned little publicity, and on the crucial day none at all. On 26 May 1969, the front page of the Age proposed as the most pressing question for contemporary women ‘Are Ladies in...
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Gideon Haigh | The Nation Reviewed | October 2007 | Business
Australians go to the polls this month in elections with a huge bearing on their future prosperity, in which they will not only return every candidate by an overwhelming majority but consent to the massive pay rises these people have demanded - pay rises, indeed, that they are actually powerless to...
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